Books by "Thomas Allan Brady"
4 books found
‘Allen Brady & Marsh is one of the UK’s greatest and most famous advertising agencies.’ Marketing Week. 5 April 1991. “When he [Tim Bell] moved on to help found Lowe, Howard-Spink & Bell, Campaign, published its annual league table of top industry ‘presenters’. Tim came out top, Peter Marsh, another colleague and legend, came second, and Frank Lowe was third.” Lord Grade mentions Peter Marsh in his eulogy at Lord Bell’s memorial service. 2020. ‘Peter Marsh hired me. Gave me my first job in advertising. He was pretty much the only ‘boss’ I ever had. Taught me all I ever needed to know about advertising. I owe him everything.’ Trevor Beattie. Twitter (or X) 2024.
Marketing Week called Allen Brady & Marsh ‘one of the UK’s greatest and most famous advertising agencies.’ This was no exaggeration. It was an agency that ploughed its own furrow, and produced advertising that still remains remembered and famous today. It was also an agency that others in the industry feared or even disliked. Not just muttering their distaste behind closed doors but publicly. At the root of this was the co-founders flamboyance, and that the agency was a believer in the power of jingles - even when they became deeply unfashionable. None the less, there is much to learn from the ABM story. And much to be amused by - to the extent that there are two volumes devoted to it.
Mostly when we read stories about advertising in the media or in books, they concentrate on the big names of the business - whether advertisers and their brands, agencies, or people. Yet while they sit at the undoubted glamorous end of the spectrum, picking up creative awards and with tales of off-screen outré antics to spill, they represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of numbers. Under the waterline most of the smaller ad agencies were independent; a few were the regional subsidiaries of the biggest agencies (Saatchis, Dorlands, JWT, McCanns, Royds and Streets all had offices in Manchester for example); a few were also second string agencies in London set up by the main agency for a variety of reasons: specialist agencies that worked in recruitment, finance, corporate, and business-to-business advertising for example; or to handle conflicting accounts, or clients that were too small for the main agency to handle profitably. But as Campaign once wrote, there is a ‘stigma attached to these agencies.’ They were (still are?) seen as second class and on the fringes of the business. Rarely did they act as feeder agencies for talent (unlike journalism where many leading journalists started their careers on local newspapers before ending up on Fleet Street). Even the Chairman of JWT Manchester admitted in the early ‘80s that ‘Northern advertising people have a bit of a complex about their London counterparts. All regional agencies are in danger of being a bit provincial in their outlook.’ This volume looks at those agencies mainly through a diary written in the late 1970s. This gives a vivid, truthful, warts-and-or portrayal of what life was like in the tail-end of the advertising business.